The present invention is related to photofinishing and more particularly to a system and method for assuring the quality of products and services provided by photofinishers.
A retail photofinishing site is a business that has the capability using on-site equipment, such as photofinishing mini-labs, to locally produce photofinishing services directly for a customer. There are currently over one hundred thousand retail photofinishing sites worldwide, and the number is increasing rapidly. A wholesale photofinishing laboratory receives photofinishing orders from a plurality of distributed outlets, such as camera stores, department stores, grocery stores, and drug stores that do not have on-site photofinishing capability, and fulfills the photofinishing orders for the retail outlets. There are currently a few hundred wholesale photofinishers world wide.
Presently, manufacturers of photographic equipment and supplies such as the Eastman Kodak Company license their brand name to wholesale photofinishers. It would be desirable for such manufacturers to leverage their brand identity by licensing the use of their brand name to their retail photofinishing customers. To protect the brand, the level of quality of branded products and services from the retail photofinishers must be controlled. Existing systems employed by photographic manufacturers for assuring quality of the wholesale photofinishers, primarily include manually implemented processes and measures requiring a high degree of personal involvement and contact by representatives of the photographic manufacturer. It is primarily because of the high level of personal interaction required to assure quality, that manufacturer branded output is currently limited to a relatively few large volume wholesale photofinishing laboratories.
Efforts to provide quality control for retail photofinishing sites have concentrated on the chemical processing aspect of the photofinishing operation. For example one approach to providing quality assurance in a retail photofinisher is the Kodatel(trademark) system wherein manufacturer supplied control materials are processed in the retail site""s equipment and measured by a densitometer to produce process control data relating to the chemical processes used at the retail photofinishing site. In this system, there is not necessarily a connection between the manufacturer and the retail site. Since these quality assurance approaches for retail photofinishing sites do not address all aspects of quality experienced by the consumer, it has not been the practice of the industry to license the photographic manufacturers brand to retail photofinishers. There is a need therefore for an improved quality assurance system for retail photofinishing that can enable the broader licensing of the photographic manufacturers"" brand name.
The need is met according to the present invention by providing a quality assurance system for retail photofinishing including a communication network; a retail photofinishing site including photofinishing equipment, a client computer connected to the communication network, and a process monitoring device connected to the computer; and a service center computer located at a service center and connected to the communication network. Client software running on the client computer includes: a quality management application for providing quality information to a manager of the photofinishing site; an operator testing and training application for training and certifying an operator of the retail site and providing testing, training and certification related data to the service center and the quality management application; a quality evaluation application for monitoring the quality of the product and services provided by the photofinishing site and providing quality related data to the service center and the quality management application; a customer feedback application for providing customer feedback information to the quality management application and to the service center; and a process control application for monitoring the condition of the photofinishing equipment at the site and providing process control data to the service center and to the quality management application. Software running on the service center computer, includes an application for collecting storing and analyzing data from a plurality of photofinishing sites and producing a report on the quality of products and services provided by the sites.